Rogues is a worthy addition to an already impressive canon. If the essays in Rogues have whetted your appetite for more Radden Keefe, I can recommend two of his previous books: Say Nothing, about the murder of Jean McConville in Northern Ireland, and Empire of Pain, about the Sackler family and how it became embroiled in America’s opioid epidemic. It is a deep, bittersweet, entertaining dive into the phenomenon that was (the past tense still hurts) Anthony Bourdain.īourdain comes across exactly the way you would want him to: curious, intelligent, generous, witty and kind with insecurity nipping at the edges of his halo. As Keefe observes in his preface: They reflect on some of my abiding. He recognizes that we're all unreliable narrators of our own. Rogues brings together a dozen of his most celebrated articles from the New Yorker.
His final piece in Rogues is called Journeyman and is probably my favourite in the book. Patrick Radden Keefe tells us in the preface to in his new book, Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks, that the 12 long-form essays reflect some of my abiding preoccupations: crime and corruption, secrets and lies, the permeable membrane separating licit and illicit worlds, the bonds of family, the power of denial. Rogues is a wonderful book, not only because Keefe's prose is masterful, but because he has a preternatural gift for reading people. Like joining MI6 in the old days (before it started advertising in The Economist), becoming a staff writer for The New Yorker has always been an opaque, rather mysterious process, but I imagine Radden Keefe with his obvious investigative skills and a prose style that highlights economy and elegance was a shoo-in for the job.
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